When I was in Japan I sat down and spoke with ~40 folks from the Japanese community on Drizzle. Japan easily has more hackers who go into the MySQL code base then any other single country (I am talking about people who hack storage engines/optimizers/etc). There is a lot of good stuff in Japan that just never makes it out of country (I'll blog about two storage engines who came out of Japan in a later blog entry). We have had number of patches that have come from folks in Japan, and I am hoping to see that grow!
Here is a couple of blog entries from folks who went to the meeting :